The aim of this thesis was to outline the intellectual influences, also known as the intellectual base, of recent music theory studies. This was done by analysing cited references from five different music theory journals between the years 2007-2016. The method used was author co-citation analysis. Source articles were downloaded from Web of Science and the computing process was carried out with the Bibexcel software. Pathfinder networks were applied in order to visualize the results. The results shows the 50 most cited authors which could be grouped into five different areas based on co-citations: